Chase Had Ads on 400,000 Sites. Then on Just 5,000. Same Results. – The New York Times

As of a few weeks ago, advertisements for JPMorgan Chase were appearing on about 400,000 websites a month. It is the sort of eye-popping number that has become the norm these days for big companies that use automated tools to reach consumers online.

Now, as more and more brands find their ads popping up next to toxic content like fake news sites or offensive YouTube videos, JPMorgan has limited its display ads to about 5,000 websites it has preapproved, said Kristin Lemkau, the bank’s chief marketing officer. Surprisingly, the company is seeing little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet, she said.

Essentially, ads on crappy sites don’t serve any purpose. The people who visit those clickbait and fake news sites don’t click on ads. Gee, what a surprise…

To be fair, this sort of thing will shake up the web advertising market. Google in particular will start losing a lot of revenue, at least from big companies who have the resources to investigate this sort of thing.